Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (24 page)

What a filler! I knew it would come in useful one day.

On board the steam packet, we pitch and toss on the grey spume-flecked waters, heading into a chill wind, laced with face-pecking rain. Some walk around the decks, I stay in what in better days was the saloon dining-room. Now it’s just tables, chairs, tea, buns and fag ends. The eyes blink, the mind goes into neutral, the throb of the ship’s engines. It’s rather like taking a boat to the Styx. Alas, it’s worse, soon it’s Crappy Calais and the excitement of No. 4 Transit Camp with its damp beds and go-as-you-please urinal. A visit to the Hotel de Ville. Beans on toast cooked by a French chef made our journey a little more bearable.

Strange I never mentioned my travelling companion’s name; and from what I remember, I’m glad. Next morning it’s raining in French. It will do le garden bon. I’m glad to be on the train heading for Italy. The leave was an experience — it was like a flashback to 1940, and trying to compress it all into four weeks. We leave the dripping eaves of Calais, through its still slumbering populace. It’s only seven-thirty and dark. My God, it’s those Sergeants. They’re all sitting opposite me again. And I don’t have Len Prosser to talk to — he’s on the train ahead.

RETURN TO ITALY

Return to Italy

T
he morning of November the second dawns. A hurrying RTO Sergeant proceeds down the corridor. “Maddaloni in fifteen minutes.” Familiar landscape is in view, the hills behind Caserta are light and dark in the morning sun. We wipe the steamed windows to see it. I’ve had breakfast: two boiled eggs, boiled bread and boiled tea. How come the Continentals can’t make tea? If this is tea, bring me coffee. If this is coffee, bring me tea. The Italian waiter says they don’t go much on tea. I tell him if they did it would make it stronger. The black giant locomotive groans and hisses to a clanking steaming halt, there’s a long shuddering final hiss as the steam leaches out, like a giant carthorse about to die. We all climb down on to the tracks. A few thank the unshaven smoke-blackened driver. There’s a clutch of lorries waiting, they are dead on time. Now the war’s over the Army’s getting it together. Wearily we clamber on board and arrive at Alexander barracks as the town is coming to life. Shagged-out cats are heading for home and the odd early morning dog sits on the cold pavement, freezing his bum and scratching away the night fleas.

“Wake up, Steve.” I shake the sleeping Yew. “Wake up, God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.”

“Piss off,” he says, without opening his eyes.

“Wake up Steve my old friend, it’s me, Sunny Spike Milligan, back from foreign shores with a tale to tell.”

He raises his lovely head, squints, groans, and lets his head fall back with a thud. Go away Milligan, go a long way away, take a known poison and only come back when you’re dead.

I take his eating irons and bring him his breakfast. This thaws him out.

“Breakfast in bed,” he says, sitting up, pulling strings that raise the mosquito net, empty the po, release his shirt, loosen his pyjamas, bring his socks, raise his vest, lower his comb, push his boots…So what was England like? It’s like 1939 with bomb craters and fruit cake, and there’s a lot of it about. I should know, I’m just recovering. Back into the office grind. What news? During the absence of the band on leave, entertainment has come to a halt.

Redivivus

W
e’ve got to do a spot on the Variety Bill this Monday.” Stan Britton welcomes me back. “They want something funny and musical.” How about ‘Ave Maria’ naked in gumboots filled with custard? No? Then ‘Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen’ sung from inside a fridge through the keyhole. No? Why am I wasting my time on this man when I could be wasting it on a woman in Sandwich?

Shock Horror Etc and Other Headlines!

I
was to get the chop! Not the leg of lamb or the kidney but the chop! While I was helping the women of England get back to normal in Sandwich, Brigadier Henry Woods has decided that either I go or he stays.

BOMBARDIER MILLIGAN S. 954024

With effect from November the umpteenth, the above will be posted to the CPA, Welfare Department, Naples.

Signed H Woods, Brigadier and midget.

So, he was the coloured gentleman in the wood pile. I swore I would never go to the pictures with him again. (He died a few years ago. I wish him well.) Why was he persecuting me like this? My only crime was my only crime. Still, like Cold Collation I could take it. I had letters to that effect from several serving women. The papers should hear of this.

DAILY MIRROR

Ace Filing Clerk To Be Axed Shock Horror etc
.

Today, Bombardier Milligan, the world-renowned corporal with three stripes, and known throughout the Italian theatre of war as the most advanced filing clerk in the British Army, heard that he was to be sacked.

— Reuter.

The band boys tried to commiserate with me. We had a last jam session in the band room and rounded off with a great piss up. I was carried to my room for the last time…

A New Life and a New Dawn

A
truck is waiting to take me away. How many times have I done this? Yet again the kit is piled in the back, and like a sheep to market, I am driven away, all on the whim of one man who thought I played my trumpet too loud. I am puzzling over what CPA means. Captain’s Personal Assistant? Cracked People’s Area? Clever Privates’ Annexe? “None of these,” says the driver. “It’s ‘Centril Pule of Hartists (Central Pool of Artists), hits a place where orl dhan-graded squaddies who can hentertain are sent.” Was he a down-graded entertainer?

“Yer.”

“What do you do?”

“Hi sing Hopera.”

“Opera?”

“Yer, you know,
La Bhome, Traviahta
, and the like.”

“Were you trained?”

“Now, it cum natural like.”

“Have you ever sung in opera natural like?”

“No, I just done the horditions like. The Captain says ‘ees waitin’ for a suitable vehicle for me.” Like a bus, I thought.

We have driven through Naples, turned left at the bottom of Via Roma up the Corso San Antonio, which goes on for ever in an Eastern direction. Finally we arrive at a broken-down Army Barracks complex. The walls are peeling, they look as if they have mange. I report to a Captain Philip Ridgeway, a sallow saturnine fellow with a Ronald Colman moustache who looks as if he has mange as well. He sits behind the desk with his hat on. He is the son of the famous Ridgeways’ Late Joys Revue that led to the Players Theatre. He looks at my papers. “So, you play the trumpet. Do you play it well?”

“Well, er loudly.”

“Do you read music?”

“Yes, and the
Daily Herald
.”

He smiled. He would find me a place in ‘one of our orchestras’. I was taken by a Corporal Gron, who looked like an unflushed lavatory, and shown to a billet on the first floor, a room with forty single beds around the walls. In them were forty single men. This being Sunday, they were of a religious order that kept them in kip until midday. I drop my kit on a vacant bed, and it collapses to the floor. “That’s why it’s vacant,” laughed Corporal Gron, who laughed when babies fell under buses. Next bed is Private Graham Barlow. He helps me repair the bed with some string and money. Nice man — he played the accordion. Noel Coward said, “No gentleman would ever play the accordion.”

I had no job as such, and as such I had no job. Breakfast was at 8.30, no parade, hang around, lunch, hang further around, tea, extended hanging around, dinner and bed. The CPA Complex had the same ground plan as the Palace of Minos at Knossos, consisting of rehearsal rooms, music stores, costume stores, scenery dock and painting area, Wardrobe Mistress, Executive offices. People went in and were never seen again. The company was assembled from soldier artistes who had been down-graded. They would be formed into concert parties and sent on tour to entertain those Tommies who weren’t down-graded. The blind leading the blind. The facilities were primitive, the lavatories were a line of holes in the ground. When I saw eighteen soldiers squatting/balancing over black holes with straining sweating faces for the first time, they looked like the start of the hundred yards for paraplegic dwarfs.

My first step to ‘fame’ came when I borrowed a guitar from the stores. I was playing in the rehearsal room when a tall cadaverous gunner said, “You play the guitar then?” This was Bill Hall. If you’ve ever seen a picture of Niccolò Paganini, this was his double. What’s more, he played the violin and played it superbly; be it a Max Bruch Concerto or I’ve Got Rhythm, he was a virtuoso. But bloody scruffy. We teamed up just for the fun of it, and in turn we were joined by Johnny Mulgrew, a short Scots lad from the Recce Corps; as he’d left them they were even shorter of Scots. Curriculum Vitae: Pre-war he played for Ambrose and the Inland Revenue. In the 56 Recce in N. Africa. Trapped behind enemy lines at Madjez-el-Bab. Lay doggo for forty-eight hours in freezing weather. Got pneumonia. Down-graded to B2…

Together we sounded like Le Hot Club de France. When we played, other musicians would come and listen to us — a compliment — and it wasn’t long before we were lined up for a show.

In the filling-in time, I used to play the trumpet in a scratch combination. It led to my meeting with someone from Mars, Gunner Secombe, H., singer and lunatic, a little myopic blubber of fat from Wales who had been pronounced a loony after a direct hit by an 88-mm gun in North Africa. He was asleep at the time and didn’t know about it till he woke up. General Montgomery saw him and nearly surrendered. He spoke like a speeded up record, no one understood him, he didn’t even understand himself; in fact, forty years later he was knighted for not being understood.

The Officers’ Club, Naples. We were playing for dancing and cabaret, the latter being the lunatic Secombe. His ‘music’ consisted of some tatty bits of paper, two parts, one for the drums and one for the piano — the rest of us had to guess. We busked him on with ‘I’m just wild about Harry’. He told us he had chosen it because his name was Harry, and we said how clever he was. He rushed on, chattering, screaming, farting, sweat pouring off him like a monsoon, and officers moved their chairs back. Then the thing started to shave itself, screaming, chattering and farting; he spoke at high speed; the audience thought he was an imported Polish comic, and many wished he was back in Warsaw being bombed. Shaving soap and hairs flew in all directions, then he launched into a screaming duet with himself, Nelson Eddie and Jeanette Macdonald, but you couldn’t tell him apart. A few cries of ‘hey hup’ and a few more soapy farts, and he’s gone, leaving the dance floor smothered in shaving soap. His wasn’t an act, it was an interruption.

The dance continues, and officers are going arse over tip in dozens. “No, not him,” they’d say when Secombe’s name came up for a cabaret.

Secombe, December 1945 — having cleared the Officers’ Club, Naples, with screaming, raspberries, shaving and singing — well pleased

Bill Hall. A law unto himself. He ignored all Army discipline, he ignored all civilian discipline. His regiment had despaired of him and posted him to CPA with an apology note.

Take kit parade. We are all at our beds, kit immaculately laid out for inspection. The Orderly Officer reaches Gunner Hall. There, on an ill-made bed, where there should be 19 items of army apparel, are a pair of socks, three jack-knives, a vest, a mess tin and a fork. The officer looks at the layout. He puts his glasses on.

OFFICER:

Where is the rest of your kit?

GUNNER HALL:

It’s on holiday, sir.

Apart from Gunner Secombe, CPA contained other stars to be, including Norman Vaughan, Ken Platt and Les Henry, (who later formed The Three Monarchs).

The CPA Personnel, including Spike Milligan (No. 1) and Harry Secombe (No. 2
)